Sundance 2011: Sobering Up to Sobering Docs Reagan and The Flaw

For those in the documentary world, selection by Sundance represents a peak of achievement. Here the limelight falls as equally upon the non-fiction set as it does on their hipper dramatic cousins, especially because it’s often easier to wait-list a documentary ticket. After a late-night traipsing from The Details’s after party at the Bing Bar to Gun Hill Road’s intimate fête at Park City’s Asian-fusion restaurant Shabu, I caught a morning viewing of documentaries to counter excessive ski-slope frivolity: Eugene Jarecki’s profile of the iconic 40th president in Reagan, and David Sington’s examination of the financial crisis, The Flaw. Both filmmakers are familiar Sundance faces (Jarecki for Why We Fight and Sington for In the Shadow of the Moon), and watching their two docs together proved a thought-provoking pairing. Reagan provides a fascinating look at Ronald Reagan, and its subtle critique falls less on the man than on the idea of him. Jarecki’s non-polemical take explores the Reagan presidency as a kind of compelling Rorshach test—conservatives could idolize him, liberals could hate him, but no one could dismiss him. However, in probing further into the “real” Reagan, Jarecki suggests that the need of the American public, and specifically the need of the American conservative movement, for a hero transformed him into an all-powerful icon. Reagan seeks to burst the myth of Ronald Reagan, while at the same time acknowledging the powerful effects of that myth on American history.

On the one hand, interview footage with Reagan’s son brings him very much down to Earth—Ron Reagan neither lionizes nor unduly criticizes his father. On the other, historians, politicians, and individual experts examine and acknowledge all the important moments that centered around him: the end of the Cold War, the optimism of the 1980s, and the scandal of Iran-Contra. Further, the documentary demonstrates the word “Reagan” now connotes policies that had little or nothing to do with the real Ronald Reagan, or his presidency: Reagan expanded the size of government, encouraged massive budget deficits, and granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. And before liberals get too haughty about Tea Party hypocrisy, they are also wise to remember that he avoided actual large-scale conflicts (at least compared with Iraq), opened channels of communication with the Soviet Union, and presided over a period of measurable, if unequal, economic growth.

If Reagan maintained unparalleled popularity, Reagan argues it was because of his genius in projecting hope and warmth to the American public. He was, after all, a highly trained actor who brought the charisma of movies into government: as any good actor will tell you, there’s a zeroing out of self that occurs in performance that allows one to become a blank slate upon which the dreams, hopes, needs and expectations of your audience will be projected. According to Jarecki, Reagan had been preparing for the “role” of president his entire life, and the key to a good performance is being able to believe fully the role you are playing. Reagan combined an ambitious man’s canniness for reading the political moment with an actor’s ability to believe fully the role he was called to play.

The Flaw, meanwhile, tackles the deflation of the housing bubble that has currently crippled the American economy, looking backwards to discover its origins. Not nearly as flashy or concrete as this year’s The Inside Job, The Flaw nonetheless has the benefits of a more philosophical examination of the foundational causes of America’s financial decline. The Inside Job is like a great heist movie filled with the minute details of process and the juice of human drama. The Flaw is an academic take with charts that demonstrate the fundamental imbalances and deeper structural reasons for the events you see in The Inside Job. As Sington told us in a Park City café, while the bankers he interviewed could narrate what happened, why was less clear: “It was surprising to me that the people deeply involved in Wall Street had little insight into their own dilemma—my view of Wall Street is they’re not evil, but they’re also not geniuses. It becomes clear to me that the story was being told—that money was being lent to people it shouldn’t be lent to—was really not the cause of the crisis. It wasn’t that there were new borrowers of lower credit quality; it was that the borrowers’ credit quality had declined.” While it may provide less human high drama, The Flaw offers a feeling of scientific examination and tantalizing hypotheses, namely that the current credit crisis resulted from the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth after the 1970s—precisely the period when Ronald Reagan’s presidency renewed a sense of hope in America.

The “flaw” of the title refers to Alan Greenspan’s famous post-crash admission to Henry Waxman that his operating worldview was far from complete. Sington ultimately proscribes that we need to increase wages, benefitting those who spend and “consume” more, to spur economic growth. Basically, re-distribute wealth downwards through better wages, and American might just be able to get back on track in a sustainable way. The only thing that needs reform is the self-serving ideology among the top 1 percent that America’s wealth is better kept in their hands, which the events of the last two years do much to dispute.

Taken together, these two documentaries explore how the last few decades of the 20th century were rife with wild yet powerful illusions. Simply through belief, we were able to temporarily re-order the structure of the world, and for a while, it seemed to work. However, every dream comes to an end, and when you wake up, you still have credit cards to pay off. The solace might be that with a clear-eyed view of reality, you may finally be able to address the fundamental “flaws” that led to the dream’s failure.